The Schwartz Report

Microsoft's New InMage Scout Added to Azure Site Recovery Licenses

Microsoft moved quickly after last week's acquisition of InMage Systems to say that the InMage Scout software appliances for Windows and Linux physical and virtual instances will be included in its Azure Site Recovery subscription licenses.

Azure Site Recovery, a service announced at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Houston in May, is the rebranded Hyper-V Recovery Manager. Azure Site Recovery, unlike its predecessor, allows customers to use the Microsoft Azure public cloud as a backup target rather than requiring a second datacenter. Image Scout is an on-premises appliance which in real time captures data on a continuous basis as those changes occur. It then simultaneously performs local backups or remote replication via a single data stream.

With the addition of InMage Scout subscription licenses to the Azure Site Recovery service, Microsoft said customers will be able to purchase annual protection for instances with the InMage Scout offering. Microsoft is licensing Azure Site Recovery on a per virtual or physical instance basis. The service will be available for customers with Enterprise Agreements on Aug. 1. For now, that's the only way Microsoft is letting customers purchase InMage Scout, though it's not required for Azure Site Recovery. The InMage Scout software is available for use on a trial basis through Aug. 1 via the Azure portal.

The company also quietly removed the InMage-4000 appliance from the portfolio, a converged system with compute storage and network interfaces. The InMage-4000 was available with up to 48 physical CPU cores, 96 threads, 1.1TB of memory and 240TB of raw storage capacity. It supports 10GigE storage networking and built-in GigE Ethernet connectivity. Though it was on the InMage Web site last Friday, by Sunday it was removed.

A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed the company is no longer offering the turnkey appliance but hasn't ruled out offering a similar type system in the future